How do I archive things I want to keep forever?

Photographs and documents are now the household possessions most likely to be lost entirely, because a single drive or a single account is a single point of failure and nobody notices until they look.

Safety

Step by step

1. Decide what is genuinely irreplaceable.Photographs, video of people, scanned documents, letters, creative work. That set is much smaller than everything you own, and treating it separately makes a proper archive affordable.
2. Apply the 3-2-1 rule.Three copies of the data, on two different types of media, with one copy off-site. It is the standard because it survives a drive failure, a theft and a house fire respectively.
3. Choose formats that will still open.JPEG, PNG, PDF, MP4, plain text, CSV. Avoid proprietary formats tied to one app. If something exists only in a subscription app's format, export a copy in an open one.
4. Export from services rather than trusting them.Photo services, social platforms and email providers all offer a data export. A service you do not control is not an archive, however large it is.
5. Do not rely on optical discs.Ordinary writable CDs and DVDs degrade within years and drives to read them are disappearing. If you have old ones, get the contents off now.
6. Use two different drive types or brands.Drives from the same batch can fail at similar times. Two makes, or a drive plus a cloud copy, avoids a correlated failure.
7. Keep one copy out of the house.A relative's house, a workplace, a bank box, or a cloud account. Fire and theft take everything in one building, including your backup drive.
8. Organise it once, properly.Dated folders in year-month form and meaningful file names. An archive nobody can navigate does not get used, and future-you will not remember DSC_04412.
9. Write a plain-text index.A simple file listing what is where and why. It costs ten minutes and it is what makes the archive usable by someone other than you.
10. Check it annually.Open a random selection of files from each copy. Silent corruption and dead drives are only discovered by looking, and by then the other copies matter.
11. Refresh the media every few years.External drives are consumables. Copy to new media every three to five years, which also gives you a natural moment to verify.
12. Tell someone it exists.Where the copies are and how to reach them. An archive nobody else knows about is lost with you, which defeats the purpose for family material.
13. Print the few that matter most.A printed photograph needs no format, no device and no password. For a small number of irreplaceable images it is the most durable option there is.

Tips

• Three copies, two media types, one off-site. Everything else here is detail.
• Open the files once a year. An archive fails silently, and the annual check is the only thing that catches it.
• Print the handful you would grieve losing. No format ever obsoletes paper.

Common mistakes

• Treating one cloud account as the archive — Accounts close for inactivity, non-payment or policy reasons, and sync propagates a deletion everywhere. It is one copy, not three.
• Leaving material in a proprietary app format — When the subscription lapses or the app disappears, the files may be unopenable. Export a copy in an open format alongside.

If it doesn't work